Digital Marketing Review / Best of the Week

Digital Marketing Review

• The Big Group has created the most amazing Oscar-related infographic EVER
• UX and why ‘Users Don’t Care About Exploring Your Product’
• Fashion: the big Levi’s comeback
• Infographic: ‘Increase Retweets and Improve Engagement on Twitter With These 12 Tips’
• ‘Despite skepticism, Twitter delivers for brands’
• Like rocket engines sounds? Check NASA’s account on SoundCloud
• Interactive Barbie is coming!
• Six Myths about Data-Driven Design
• ‘5 things we learned about digital’s effect on TV advertisers’
• Research / fashion: brands as publishers
• Mark “Copyranter” Duffy: ‘Native advertising is killing ad creativity

The Big Group has created the most amazing Oscar-related infographic EVER

Let’s start with something impressive. The guys at Big Group came up with something unbelievable, ‘The 2014 Oscars provided an ideal opportunity to create a piece of topical content that would engage our target market and demonstrate our approach to content marketing.’ So they created to ‘an infographic featuring every dress worn by winners of the Best Actress Oscar from 1929 – 2013.’

An infographic featuring EVERY dress worn by winners of the Best Actress Oscar from 1929 – 2013. wow.

Want to hear some numbers? ‘Seeding the infographic began on the Tuesday before the Oscars. By Wednesday it was featured on Cosmo, Grazia, Mail Online, Time Magazine, Huffington Post, the Washington Post, Elle, Marie Claire, Glamour, El Pais, La Republica, Neon & La Moda. 385 sites featured the infographic, with 170,000 visitors viewing our site over 5 days. It gained thousands of shares across social channels and at one stage was mentioned on twitter every 20 seconds. 170 countries referred traffic to our site and we estimate that it generated around 100 million views in total.’

UX and why ‘Users Don’t Care About Exploring Your Product’

Once again, this is not fresh news, but it’s very interesting, so forgive me, I am just a sinner, not a pinner. It’s not even really digital marketing, either. Whatever. Laura Klein, Principal at Users Know & Author of UX for Lean Startups blogs about UX, Research, Product Management, and Lean Startup. This post is about your business, your products, and users. ‘Often, entrepreneurs ask me something to the effect of, “What’s the best way to let new users explore my product?”

My answer is almost always a variation of, “Stop it.” In order to be slightly more helpful, let’s look at why this is a terrible question.

Users Don’t Care About Exploring Your Product

Nobody cares about your product. Fundamentally, what users care about is themselves. They are using your product as a means to an end. We knew this

back in 1960 when Theodore Levitt explained that when customers buy quarter inch drills, they really are buying quarter inch holes.’ Read more here.

Fashion: the big Levi’s comeback

Let’s talk about fashion.

Very interesting article on BoF ‘Inside Levi’s Comeback Plans. Attacked from all sides by a surge of competitors, how is the 161-year-old pioneer of blue jeans reasserting itself?’

‘“There are more denim brands born this century than in the previous 104 years,” said James Curleigh (or “JC”), global president of the Levi’s brand, sitting in a conference room at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “All of a sudden, we get attacked by premium. All of a sudden, value and own-label and fast fashion come and try to take a piece of the business. Traditional competitors, like Wrangler and Lee, also wake up to a moment of denim growth,” he continued. “So, you’re getting attacked by premium, value, traditional and fast fashion.”’

Infographic: ‘Increase Retweets and Improve Engagement on Twitter With These 12 Tips’

We know you like infographics, so here’s a tasty one for you, created by MDM and HubSpot. Increase Retweets and Improve Engagement on Twitter With These 12 Tips

Talking about Twitter…

From DIGIDAY: ‘Despite skepticism, Twitter delivers for brands’. ’Atlantic editor Derek Thompson meanwhile published a story on Monday about how Twitter is overrated for publishers. In it, he outlined how his own tweets receive a large amount of engagement on Twitter itself (in the forms of favorites and retweets), but a surprisingly low number of users click through to The Atlantic’s website to read the stories he tweets about.’

More here

Like rocket engines sounds? Check NASA’s account on SoundCloud

Are you now bored and want to listen to some rad tunes, let’s say rocket engines sounds? Check NASA’s account on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/nasa

Interactive Barbie is coming!

From Engadget: ‘Interactive Barbie is your kids’ future BFF’

‘Oh. Em. Gee. Mattel is developing a new talking Barbie, and this time, the company’s not programming it with silly canned phrases. Nope, Mattel’s working on an actual interactive model called “Hello Barbie” that kids (and adults) can talk to, sort of like Siri and Cortana — but in doll form with long, luxurious blonde hair.’

Read more here.

‘Six Myths about Data-Driven Design

There is a lot of buzz about data-driven design, but very little agreement about what data-driven design really means. Even deciding how to define data is difficult for teams with spotty access to data within their organizations, uneven understanding, and little shared language. For any site or app, it’s standard practice to have analytics, A/B tests, surveys, intercepts, benchmarks, scores of usability tests, ethnographic studies, and interviews. So what counts as data? And more importantly, what will inform design in a meaningful way?

In trying to understand what data-driven design is, we can start with what data-driven design is not. Then maybe we can work toward how data might actually help make user experience better.’ (See more here.)

More interesting stuff!

‘5 things we learned about digital’s effect on TV advertisers’

‘Television still sucks up more media spend than any other medium, but digital media has foisted change on the industry. Pity the poor chief marketing officer.’

‘Digital has made a mess of attribution.

When brands were advertising across fewer channels, namely just television, it was simpler to understand the effectiveness of any given campaign. But consumers’ path to purchase today resembles a bowl of spaghetti more than a funnel, said Haber, making it difficult for advertisers to comprehend the real value of their campaigns, video or otherwise.

“I wish we could really understand cross-channel attribution better. It’s a problem. When you look at return on investment on channels, people will say there’s no return on investment on that. I’ll say there is, but when you go back to that spaghetti bowl, it’s difficult to understand where they are on that little path, and we can’t see through that yet.”’

Read more here. 

Research / fashion: brands as publishers

A very interesting research we found on Econsultancy – ‘an industry audit of the fashion ecommerce vertical, specifically of the way fashion ecommerce websites have invested in online content.’

‘Overview

The report examines how true the mantra of ‘brands as publishers’ is in the sector through comparisons between publishing methods, and builds on James Gurd’s earlier paper for Econsultancy: Where Content and Commerce Collide. This paper acknowledges the main trends and outcomes of this report while putting a looking glass over the specific tactics and best practices deployed by leading fashion ecommerce websites.’

Download it here.

Last but not least, a great rant by Mark “Copyranter” Duffy: ‘Native advertising is killing ad creativity’

‘The “content” being produced is an embarrassment to the advertising industry, and more importantly, to the brands sponsoring it. All of it falls into one of two general categories: Dumb or Boring. Yet few ad creative leaders are speaking out about it. That’s because in just four years, this financial savior of Web publishing has become a big revenue stream for everyone involved (except the brands themselves, but shh, don’t bring that up) and it’s getting bigger fast; nobody dares rock the boat.

When I say native advertising sucks, I’m talking creatively, because that’s what I know: Creative. I’ve been a professional ad creative for 25-plus years. I’ve created hundreds of good ads (and thousands of bad ones), I’ve won awards, I’ve judged awards shows, plus I’ve reviewed ads professionally for nine years. For the last year, I’ve been clicking on and reading/watching a lot of native ads on a lot of big media sites. And I’m tired of of shaking my head in disgust. Advertising creativity is being destroyed by this shit, destroyed by technology, destroyed by digital content creators, social media managers, in-house creative studios, moonlighting journalists and the clients themselves.’

Legend. Read more here.

Cover Image Credit: Freepik.com